Content warning: Discussion of grievous bodily injury
So, both my first two theories on the origin of high-heeled shoes in European fashion turned out to be bunk. I mean, I know that originally men wore high heels, but I did not expect the manner in which they appeared on the fashion scene.
(And no, the answer isn’t “butchers” either. Butchers in ancient Egypt wore high heels. Then they went out of fashion for, uh… a while.)
(And yes, I already said that high heels weren’t integral to my line of research. I spent a day writing up this post anyway. NOT EVEN I CAN STOP MYSELF SOMETIMES.)
My first theory was kind of wild. I thought high heels might be descended from the wooden platform shoes medieval Europeans wore to keep out of muddy conditions:
It would have been cool because platform shoes got RIDICULOUS, but we’ll have to get back to chopines another day. They don’t feature in this story.
As I got deeper into the research, I had to admit to myself that I was subconsciously expecting high heels to evolve from what I thought of as “conservative” and “natural” heels, to the more “refined” and “unnatural” heels.
But that’s projecting modern sensibilities into the past. These days we’re concerned with whether shoes will fit with our lives, the ways we move and the spaces we live with. We don’t even know what the concerns of the past are, and therefore aren’t good at predicting why they’d pick one shoe over another.
I therefore did not expect the shoe that convinced sixteenth-century Europe that high heels were the Next Big Thing to be… this one.
Not that exact pair, you understand, so it’s not just because of that absolutely divine aquamarine colour. But those are one of the best extant examples of 16th century Persian cavalry shoes.
In fact, those are
elite tactical military gear
I’ll explain, but it’s gonna get dark.
